With so much good music being released all the time, it can be hard to determine what to listen to first. Every week, Pitchfork offers a run-down of significant new drops available on streaming services. This week’s batch includes new albums from Lambchop, Julia Holter, GB, Diamond*, and more.
Subscribe to Pitchfork’s New Music Friday newsletter to get our recommendations in your inbox every week. (All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our affiliate links, however, Pitchfork earns an affiliate commission.) Lambchop: Punching the Clown [Merge] Had Kurt Wagner not turned on the radio while driving late one night, Lambchop’s new album wouldn't exist in its current form. Desperate to find a beguiling track he heard somewhere between the dials, the bandleader accidentally discovered “lined out singing,” a type of call-and-response gospel popular with Scottish immigrants in Appalachia at the turn of the 20th century.
The format—a song leader starts the song, and the chorus rises up to meet them over the course of a verse—was developed out of necessity: not every parishioner could read, so the leader reminded everyone what came next. But Wagner‘s decision to adopt the style on Punching the Clown was pure passion. Complete with a full choir helmed by Blake Morgan, the new LP does the form justice with its pared-back, thoughtfully observed ballads and modern hymns.
Listen on Apple Music Listen on Spotify Listen on Tidal Listen on Amazon Music Listen/Buy at Bandcamp Buy at Rough Trade Julia Holter: Materia [Domino] Julia Holter’s minimalist and prismatic music has taken on many forms over the years: chamber pop, bossa nova, field recordings, Hindu devotionals. But what might it look like to apply this multifaceted mindset to a single song? The Los Angeles songwriter’s latest, Materia, does just that.
The title draws from a standout from 2024’s Something in the Room She Moves, a song she moulds into two distinct new versions: the fretless bass and clarinet symphony “Materia 2” and the slow, spare “Materia 3.” Materia, however, offers more than just fresh perspective on familiar territory (see: the titanic 10-minute solo improvisation “My Twin”). Well over a decade into her career, Holter still has new sides to show, each more revelatory the last. Or it could grow stiff and unyielding, lily-gilded with math rock riffs, odd time signatures, and lyrics scrapbooked together out of the pages of London’s Metro newspaper.
What’s remarkable, then, is how Berntsten’s AD 93 debut just breezes by—a balancing act he’s mastered alongside many of his fellow Danish esotericists. If you’ve ever wondered what late-era Arctic Monkeys would sound like if they got really into American Football (or you’re wondering that for the first time right now) this is the album for you. The buzzy Atlanta rapper has emerged head-and-shoulders above a crowded underground landscape this year: with his ØWay crew and partner-in-slime Tezzus, and on a debut Bling Boi EP.
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